The thought of doing a PhD couldn't be less appealing to me. Essentially, you will be paid pittance to research something that anyone else could spend four years investigating. It's unlikely to be life changing. Furthermore, anyone else can use your knowledge in a practical sense after you have completed it.
Underlining mine
Are you referring specifically to the OP's possible thesis area or PhDs in general? If its the former you're being a little presumptuous and if its the latter then you're flat out
wrong. The whole point of PhDs (though this is becoming somewhat watered down) is they are supposed to be difficult, hence why they are valued. Not just in the "This stuff is academically complicated" or "I need to think about this" but in the sense of having to spend 3~5 (or more in some countries!) years working on a very specific thing, with pretty much only yourself for motivation. Even academically gifted people sometimes drop by the wayside of a PhD due to the psychological pressure they feel, even if they are breezing through the work.
Its important to
really enjoy and be interested in your thesis area, else you'll grow to hate it precisely because you have to do it
every day and if you have a day off no one else picks up the slack, its still there waiting for you when you go back to the office the next day. In the office I worked in during my PhD there were 5 other people and while I think I could, if I put in the time, understand to a working level each person's research I couldn't have done a PhD in just any one of those topics because I didn't find all of them interesting.
Yes, there are some PhDs where you hear the thesis title and think "
Really? You spent X years on
that?!" because it sounds pointless or vapid. From my experience that tends to happen
less often in the realms of science, where specific goals might be clearer and the contribution of a thesis more easily evaluated.
It's unlikely to be life changing.
In what sense? Reshaping the entire academic landscape? No, its not likely that's going to happen. If you mean help focus your research skills, self motivation, long term goals and the multitude of little skills/abilities needed to do a PhD then it
will be life changing. My view of maths and physics in general was heavily reshaped by doing a PhD. Now I feel I have a good overview of many things I studied at university and I'm more happier with what I do and don't grasp and how various bits of my knowledge fit together. At the start of my PhD I'd say things were quite different.
Furthermore, anyone else can use your knowledge in a practical sense after you have completed it.
That's the whole point of scientific research, the better and help the community as a whole. Yes, research done for private companies needs to be kept quiet so the company can profit from it but if you're going into a publicly funded PhD then your research should be available to all. Things like
www.arxiv.org have helped the physics and maths community enormously, as results and methods can be spread within days, not months or years.
The whole 'change the world' philosphy is a massive farce most of the time.
Anyone who goes into a PhD and
doesn't think "It'd be nice if I came up with something great" shouldn't be doing a PhD. That doesn't mean you go in thinking "I
will come up with something great", but a sense of optimism and a purpose in mind certainly isn't a bad thing.
When I studied biology I wanted to cure cancer. I then learned that if I took a PhD it would most likely be spending 4 years rearching one receptor on one protein out of a hundred that is produced in one stage of a life cycle of a fungus that nobody cares about and has no use.
It sounds like you had a bit of a naive view of science then. Didn't you realise during your degree just how
vast the effort required to build up our current knowledge is? Every single page in a textbook represents dozens, even hundreds, of people's careers, particularly when huge quantities of experimental results are needed. Yes, curing cancer would be nice but without the combined effort of millions of man-years of pain staking work like examining each protein receptor in turn we'll never cure cancer. As Newton said, if we see further it is because we stand on the shoulders of giants. Now we see further because we stand on
everyone's shoulders. Open a PhD thesis to the references and you'll find
hundreds of references, each of which will references dozens or hundreds, and likewise, on and on.
Do you really want to spend four years of you life doing that? Really? Really really really?
Unless there are other factors influencing you and you are 100% sure it makes sense, avoid like the plague!
The reality for most, even the
exceptionally good, science research is about chipping away, one grain at a time, at the problem. Perhaps you might be lucky and do the chip which brings down the mountain but if your attitude is that the PhD wasn't worth it because you couldn't see how you'd do something huge then clearly you're not PhD material, regardless of your academic abilities, because you have the completely wrong attitude for one. I do research because I enjoy it and because I like the fact I'm contributing to our understanding of things. Sure, I'll never make a big name for myself and now I don't even publish papers because I work for a private company (and thus any new ideas/results I do become commercially valuable IP) but ultimately the work I do will filter into the community and merge with the many thousands of other people like me, it all helps.
Being paid to think is a pretty rare thing but its not for everyone.
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